How Many Legs Has A Dog? Poem by Paul Hartal

While the Cubist artists strove to depict
simultaneous views of space, the Futurists wanted
to express a holistic now in which past, present and future
are united. Futurism was an art movement in the first
quarter of the 20th century. It was a radical trend
that aimed at discarding the past, burning the libraries
and flooding the museums.
The leader of the movement, the poet F. T. Marinetti,
who called himself 'the caffeine of Europe' and was a friend of Mussolini, glorified, speed, noise,
technology and war In 1909 Marinetti published a manifesto
in the French newspaper Figaro, which marked the
beginning of Futurism.

In an effort to squeeze time
in their art, the Futurists stole the photographic discoveries
of Etienne Jules Murey and Eward Muybridge.
The Italian painter Giacomo Balla, for example,
in 1912 painted 'Dynmism of a Dog on a Leash',
which was based on chromatographic studies of animals
in motion. The resulting image infused kinetic motion
and energy by overlapping successive frames of time.
The moving dog in the painting appears to have twenty
or more legs in the somewhat blurred pictorial
representation.